Dr. Bruce McEwen's talk on the "Neurobiology and Neuroendocrinology of Stress" has clear ties to the Decade of Behavior "health" theme. Dr. McEwen's research has established interactive changes among genes, cells, brain, and behavior in the manifestation of stress, revealing increasingly strong links between stress and disease.

The lecture promises to establish cross-disciplinary connections between Dr. McEwen's work in neurobiology and neuroendocrinology with developmentally-oriented psychobiology, neuroscience, and neurogenetics-- his lecture will help the developmental psychobiology community become more aware of these linkages in order to augment its own research on developmental perspectives in stress and disease.

Speaker Biography:

Bruce S. McEwen, Ph.D., is the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor and Head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University. McEwen graduated Summa Cum Laude in Chemistry from Oberlin College in 1959 and obtained his Ph.D. in Cell Biology in 1964 from The Rockefeller University. He returned to Rockefeller in 1966 to work with the psychologist, Prof. Neal Miller, after postdoctoral studies in neuobiology in Sweden and a brief period on the faculty at the University of Minnesota. He was appointed as Professor at Rockefeller in 1981. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences.. He served as Dean of Graduate Studies from 1991-3 and as President of the Society for Neuroscience in 1997-98. As a neuroscientist and neuroendocrinologist, McEwen studies environmentally-regulated, variable gene expression in brain mediated by circulating steroid hormones and endogenous neurotransmitters in relation to brain sexual differentiation and the actions of sex, stress and thyroid hormones on the adult brain. His laboratory discovered adrenal steroid receptors in the hippocampus in 1968. His laboratory combines molecular, anatomical, pharmacological, physiological and behavioral methodologies and relates their findings to human clinical information. He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health, in which he is helping to reformulate concepts and measurements related to stress and stress hormones in the context of human societies. He is the co-author of a new book with science writer Elizabeth Lasley for a lay audience called The End of Stress as We Know It published by the Joseph Henry Press and the Dana Press.

Presentation Summary:

Dr. McEwen will discuss his work on stress-related disease and new approaches to studies of mental state as a factor in the expression of disease. His research has focused on the mechanisms by which stress exerts its devastating effects. In particular, his laboratory concentrates on the role of hormones as multi-purpose messengers that signal changes within target cells and coordinate brain and body function in response to stress. Dr. McEwen's integrative, cross-disciplinary research approach emphasizes linkages between cellular and molecular mechanisms of neuronal differentiation and adult plasticity to behavioral and physiological processes, with links to pathophysiology and nervous and mental disorders. At the organismal level, Dr. McEwen studies learning and memory and their physiological correlates related to the hippocampus in animal models. He utilizes human brain imaging and neuropsychology to extend his findings to human cognition and brain structure.